2025/1 Translation

What is Translation?

Translation is an everyday phenomenon. When communication takes place, the process of translation also takes place. Translation as a profession and discipline has been taken for granted for a long time. It was always considered as a part of language teaching and learning. While the practice of translation has been established for centuries, the development of the field into an academic discipline only took place towards the end of the twentieth century. Before that, translation had often been relegated to an element of language learning (Munday, 2008). In the late eighteenth century to the 1960s and beyond, language learning in secondary schools in many countries was dominated by what was known as grammar-translation method (Cook 2010: 9-15) as quoted in Munday (2008).

Translation was regarded as secondary to language learning and teaching. Translation method was used to teach reading in a second or foreign language classes and would soon abandoned as soon as the learners could read the original texts. With the rise of direct method and communicative approach, the grammar-translation method lost its influence and the use of mother tongue was discouraged. From then on, translation has been abandoned from language learning and it has been restricted only to higher level and university language courses and professional translator training (Munday, 2008). Malmkjaer and Windle (2011:1) state that “the central place occupied by translation and interpreting in human culture has long been recognized, and can hardly overstated. In a globalized world, it is all too easy to take it for granted, and forget that, without these activities, linguistic communities would be condemned to a degree of cultural isolation which is nowadays difficult to imagine.” This explains how great the role of translation and interpreting is in the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic communication, and how easily translation and interpreting are to be downstated and taken for granted. The everincreasing volume of international contract and trade, crosscultural cooperation and international encounter, and of text generated by the rise of the Internet, add to the need for translation and a concomitant need for a deeper understanding of the process. Translators and interpreters have served throughout the ages as the conduits by which scientific, cultural and intellectual exchange takes place when the participants have no common language, and they continue to do so. Before we go any further, let us define translation according to several prominent experts in translation.